


The air becoming no air becoming air again

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Finntrospection, Force-Sensitive Finn, Gen, M/M, Stormtrooper Culture, Undercover Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-03 08:50:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14565405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: At the beginning of an undercover mission, Finn tries to hold onto himself.





	The air becoming no air becoming air again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> The title is from Frank O'Hara's poem "Three Airs."
> 
> Happy birthday, friend, with every kind of love, and admiration, and gratitude, and good wish. Writing in this universe is a joy for me because you're writing in it too, with your insight, your courage, your humor and honesty, and the generosity and grace of your sentences. My stories are better for knowing you, and so am I. May this year be your best yet.

Late afternoon, planetary time, and Finn has been here since the early morning. He only knows this from the face of the chrono he keeps in his pocket: the immigration office has no windows. The artificial light is like ship's light, dulling skin and eyes, making the elderly human to his left appear deathly ill and the Keshian toddler dozing in their parent's arms look like a corpse.

In his other pocket are the false datachips that say he's not Finn but Renner Antrobus, requesting a three-month residency permit to study the manufacturing processes for which this planet is known throughout the sector. Embedded in the metal of his spinal implants is a drive with a code that will transform that permit into one for Tua Bar Uri, ninth-tier resident of the city of Mu and emergency medical technician, complete with work history. He's here with two tasks: to look for Force-sensitive sentients and to use false emergency calls to plant listening tech in the houses of mid-level officials with ties to the First Order. If nothing happens to make a change of plans necessary (which is laughably unlikely), he'll switch back to his three-month identity at the end of it, and fly out on a standard transport, and take the recommended roundabout route—he lets himself hope for just a second—back to Poe's arms.

That's also laughably unlikely, given the odds.

He hates this light.

He hates not being Finn, and he has to stop being Finn and become Renner Antrobus (some name, but it was the best ID the forgers and slicers could compile on short notice) before the display above the desk brightens with the number printed on a slip of flimsiplast and getting sweaty against his palm. It's not something to set off any alarm bells in anyone's mind, his or anyone else's, electronic or organic or a mix of both. Flimsiplast next to the skin would make any humanoid sweat, whether or not they were nervous.

Nervousness itself is grounds, here, for suspicion. Like the light, this reminds him of before, waiting in ranks for inspection. If you were nervous, you must have had something to be nervous about. More than that, nervousness meant there was a difference between what you were thinking and what you should be thinking. A unified mind is at ease. A compliant mind contains answers, not questions. A stormtrooper takes his place in a line of stormtroopers as a number takes its place in a line of numbers, whether standing at attention or advancing on a disorderly population.

Before he even gets to be Renner Antrobus he has to be, however briefly, synonymous with the number in his hand. Even though he knows it's stupid, he hates that almost more than anything.

Poe would say, “It's not stupid, man, it makes sense to hate that. It's _because_ it's not true. It was never true, that's why it feels so wrong.”

Finn loves Poe and trusts him and feels the rightness of a lot of the things he says. But he isn't (he wouldn't be) quite right about this. Poe doesn't know how deep it goes, right down to Finn's nerves, his autonomic reactions: all the years that went into making him into a known quantity. If Kylo Ren's lightsaber had cut all the way through him, maybe then those impulses would be severed. But so would all the other impulses, the ones toward something else, more, different. The ones that led him here.

The sleeper to his left wakes, snuffles, stretches, rummages in their luggage. Pulls out a packet of fried and fire-salted cetacean beans, pincers out a few with their prosthetic hand, offers the bag to Finn. His stomach is too sour with anxiety to want any, but he smiles and thanks them, touched by their acknowledgment of his possible appetites and their shared endurance of this situation.

Before he got on the transport to Mu's planet, called by about half its people Senusha and the other half Lessec, he met with Rey in the asteroid cloud where she's practicing with the first batch of Force-sensitive recruits. “Brightening,” they call it, not training—brightening each other through proximity, through resonance, and yes, through practice. Stepping out of the shuttle, he'd felt a buzzing and thrumming around him, brimming in his pulse; he felt like _he_ , himself, was the answer to a question he hadn't even known anyone was asking.

Twelve people from five species sat patiently with him and Rey while he tried to sort out the quality common to their presences so that he would know it again. Not light and not darkness, but a heightening, a greater openness--“Like a complete circuit,” said Rey, and, “Like a river in spate,” said the dockworkers' child from Potamoi, and, “Like an open lane of traffic,” said the hovercab pilot from Coruscant, all of them pleased and a little scared, shaking on the brink of this new understanding of something they'd known all along—

There's no commotion, nothing to call a scuffle, but the tension in the room ratchets up, ricochets from person to person and off the brushed-steel walls, as two armed and uniformed immigration officers flank a group of five Mon Calamari. There's expostulation, and the display of something Finn can't see; there's an apparent apology. The officers step back; the travelers move through; the room exhales.

Finn tries to center himself, to breathe in rhythm with the flow of the Force, the way Rey showed him. They're apart now, all of them, she in the asteroid belt, Poe coordinating various aspects of the Resistance from a rotating series of locations, Rose building a cell whose site he doesn't know, General Organa liaising with Calrissian to improve their cash flow... A constellation, each with their own work to do to make up the larger pattern, and each with the knowledge of Finn _as_ Finn in their keeping.

And he's here, now, with his part of the work to do. He presses three fingers to his own wrist where the pulse rests, a feedback loop to recall a promise: Poe's touch there, and his own fingers on Poe's pulse in turn. It's how troopers promise, with or without speaking. It's a reminder of something he barely believes: that he was never no one. It's a reminder too that there's somewhere he wants to be and someone he wants to be with. Whether or not he ever gets there, the wanting itself is real, and his, as much a part of him now as the circuitry of his spine—resting uneasily, requiring care and attention in the balance, but there.

He wants to be able to live uneasily. He wants to live long enough to be whole. He wants that for everyone standing now in white-armored ranks in transports and garrisons, and everyone sitting and smelling like fear in this hollow-sounding room, and everyone fighting for it alongside him, _and_ he wants it for himself.

The number on the display matches the number in his hand.

Finn takes a deep breath, and tucks everything he knows and everything he wants into his pocket, and walks forward.

 


End file.
